Abstract
Plasma physics started along two parallel lines. One of them was the hundred-year-old investigations into what was called ‘electrical discharges in gases’. To a high degree, this approach was experimental and phenomenological, and only very slowly did it reach some degree of theoretical sophistication. Most theoretical physicists looked down on this field which was complicated and awkward. The plasma exhibited striations, double layers, and an assortment of oscillations and instabilities. The electron temperature was often found to be one or two orders of magnitude larger than the gas temperature, with the ion temperature intermediate. In short, it was a field which was not well suited for mathematically elegant theories.
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© 1981 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Alfvén, H. (1981). Survey. In: Cosmic Plasma. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 82. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-8374-8_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-8374-8_1
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